


Break/Light

by the_glow_worm



Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: Case Fic, Cigarettes, F/M, First Kiss, Getting Together, Horror, Psychic Abilities - Richard Strand, mentions of violence against a child, unresolved mystery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-30
Updated: 2018-12-30
Packaged: 2019-09-30 11:32:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17223254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_glow_worm/pseuds/the_glow_worm
Summary: In a little town on the Oregon coast, Alex Reagan and Richard Strand, investigating what seems like a straightforward report of cave drawings, find themselves in the dark, by the sea, on the longest night of the year. Casefic.





	Break/Light

**Author's Note:**

> This is set sometime between Season 2 and Season 3. As tags note, there will be a brief mention of physical, non-sexual violence against a child, and a scene that depicts cigarette usage.

The headlights swung crazily against the trees as they went around the curve of the road, darkness flinching back from the intrusion of light, unnatural and harsh, into its domain. Alex watched the shadows make shapes in the woods and tried not to shudder. They should be close now, if her GPS was not lying to her; it occurred to her then that it might be. The tight press of forest here in northern Oregon had been known to disrupt signal, and they had left the busy roads far behind them. They could easily have made a wrong turn somewhere, along these unlit roads; might even now be on an abandoned highway that led only to the ghost towns of the gold rush that peppered the face of Oregon like pockmarks from an old disease.

 

“We’re not lost,” said Richard, interrupting her thoughts. “I assure you. I’ve driven this area before.” There was no need to say with whom. Sourly, Alex said,

 

“Sometimes I really wonder if you _are_ a mind-reader.”

 

“You’ve been checking the GPS on your phone constantly,” Richard pointed out. “It’s actually quite irritating.”

 

“Oh.”

 

Alex snuck a glance at him, sitting in profile behind the wheel, his own eyes fixed, quite correctly, on the road. He had taken one look at her back in Seattle and insisted on being the one to drive. Alex would have liked to have been able to argue with him, but it had taken her several tries to even leave her house that morning, sleeplessness and fatigue compounding one minor disaster after another. It had been nearly sunset by the time they managed to leave Seattle. By the time they had made it off the I-5 freeway, the full dark of winter had fallen, the sun already a distant memory.

 

They’d driven through the night together, talking in low voices about nothing very substantial, through tall stands of evergreens and tiny roadside towns that only resolved themselves as lit places flashing by in the dark, before those, too, began to go out. It was beginning to become truly late. Back home, she would have begun preparations for bed, which meant that she would have had another three hours of staring at the dark to look forward to.

 

 “You can recline the seat,” said Richard, abruptly. Alex blinked. The conversation had been lapsed for some time. “Go to sleep. You need it.”

 

“Don’t you need it too?”

 

He huffed a small, private laugh. “Have you seen a mirror lately?”

 

Staying awake would have required an argument. She reclined her seat a few extra degrees and lay still; not sleeping, but curled in the dark, feeling the vibration of the road against the wheels of the car. Inside, the only sound was the steady, even sound of Richard’s breathing. Somehow it steadied her. In, and out. She could see his face in the dim reflection of the headlights. Framed between her eyelashes, his image blurred and refracted like an impressionist painting. In, and out…

 

His quick indrawn breath was what woke her. She bolted upright, her heart beating like a hammer; closer to dreaming than she had thought she’d be, or she would not have reacted so strongly.

 

The car had stopped dead. She could see the road curving away to the left, and the dim streetlights of a town glowing from the near distance. But directly ahead of them was a rocky headland, stretching out into a darkness that Alex knew, logically, must be the sea.

 

Rising from the darkness was a lighthouse.

 

It was not lit, and it took Alex a few silent moments, her heartbeat thudding against her ears, to see what it was meant to be. Every lighthouse she had seen had been tall and airy, standing proud and white against the water’s edge. This one was none of those things; it settled, low on its haunches, on a nest of wooden pilings, and looked out at them from behind its glassy black windows, malevolent in a way Alex could not explain. Only a narrow turret, jutting out insolently from the roofline, indicated anything of a concession to how a lighthouse ought to look. A reflection within that window might have been anything from a lamp to a gleaming eye. She reached, groping, for Richard’s hand; it was curled tightly around the clutch.

 

The car headlights ought not to have reached so far across the headland, and yet the lighthouse was illuminated before them as if it were merely inches away, as if she could reach out and touch the slick grey stone, and come away with her hand damp with sea-moss and rot. Alex could not breathe. No ship, she knew, had ever been saved by this lighthouse; no fisherman at night had ever been glad to see its lamp.

 

The corroded lettering on the sign said _Desdemona Sands Lighthouse. Est. 1859._

 

Richard found his voice first.

 

“I think we’ve reached our destination,” he said.

 

Alex laughed because she thought she was supposed to. The sound echoed in the car and came back towards her, ringing hollowly against her own ears, and she stopped, frightened. For a moment it had seemed as if the lighthouse was laughing at _her_.

 

* * *

 

 

The hotel smelled faintly of sand and suntan lotion, as if it hadn't been inhabited since the summer vacationers had been in town. Alex sat down on the bed without bothering to unpack. The shower running in the next room was taking up all available real estate in her brain.

 

The lighthouse already seemed like a passing bad dream, now that she sat in the faintly yellow glow of the hotel room lamps. All the details of her own reaction came back clearly to her, in embarrassing detail, but the more she tried to think about what it was about the lighthouse that had so immediately, vividly struck her, the more the feeling slipped away.

 

Alex considered, briefly, mentioning it to Richard. She dismissed the idea almost immediately; he would undoubtedly diagnose her with a long ten-dollar word that required an advanced degree to even pronounce. She decided to file that potential conversation away in the folder in her brain marked _Never, Ever_. There were a lot of potential conversations in that folder.

 

There was a text on her phone.

 

_Have you arrived? Maybe you should stay somewhere else tonight, drive into town in the morning. In case that’s easier._

 

Alex frowned. The woman she’d been emailing with had been so insistent that they arrive as soon as possible. What had changed her mind?

 

_Just arrived at the hotel. Is that okay?_

 

There was a perfunctory knock at the open door between their rooms, and Richard entered, rubbing a towel over his hair. Some of the water was dripping into his eyes, leaving his eyelashes glistening; Alex very determinedly didn't look.

 

“We’re lucky we got in when we did,” he said, without preamble. “The forecast is predicting snow. I understand that’s a relatively rare phenomenon out here.”

 

Alex huffed out a laugh. “Trust you to talk about the weather right now.”

 

“Should I not?” Richard seemed honestly perplexed. “It’s important information to have.”

 

Something like a smile tugged at her lips. “Very logical, Dr. Strand,” she teased, and then the phone buzzed again.

 

_Trailhead of Highcliff trail. 8:00._

 

“Well, we have our rendezvous,” said Alex. She showed him the message.

 

“Succinct,” he noted. “Remind me again what we’re here for?”

 

“Good idea—hold on, let me record this—”

 

Richard made an impatient noise, low in his throat. “I don’t like having to repeat myself.” There was an edge of irritation in his voice. “I was making conversation with you, not with the audience at home.”

 

Alex resurfaced from her purse, recorder triumphantly in her hand. “Got it! Sorry, what was that?”

 

“Never mind.”

 

“Could you, ah, repeat what you just said?”

 

“Never mind.”

 

“No, I mean—”

 

Richard took a slow breath in. “Remind me again what we’re here for,” he said woodenly.

 

“So about a week ago, I received an email from a young woman named Elle Klekamp in Desdemona Sands, Oregon. She had an interesting story to tell about a history of shadow men appearing in the town, as well as mysterious drawings in the local caves.” Alex frowned. “She didn’t say anything about the lighthouse, though.”

 

“Why should she?” asked Richard. “Isn’t it just a lighthouse?”

 

“I…suppose.” That was the most logical answer, but it struck her as wrong somehow. “Anyway, Elle’s promised to show us the cave drawings. She didn't include very much other detail, but..."

 

She let her thought trail away. A bucolic town by the sea, all alone except for Richard, had sounded...nice. She'd booked the hotel the same day.

 

“Anyway,” she finished, “that’s probably where the trail goes tomorrow.”

 

The phone buzzed again.

 

“’Wear waterproof clothing,’” Alex read aloud. She glanced at Richard, who quirked an eyebrow at her.

 

“Aren’t you glad I gave you the weather report?”

 

* * *

 

 

The rising sun was a thin warmth against their backs as they approached the seaside trail. Elle was a half-lit figure standing on the cliff’s edge, facing out into the ocean mists; beyond her was the grey fogbank, lit now by the sun into a blazing field of fire and gold. Alex exhaled at the sight, an involuntary sound escaping her, and Elle turned to watch them approach instead, her eyes narrowed and glittering beneath the shade of her hand.

 

She had a still, constrained face framed by a messy braid on either side, dark hair curling down over the patches on the shoulders of her windbreaker. She was young, perhaps no older than a teenager, but she carried herself with a square-shouldered erectness unusual for any age. A large pick-up idled by her; she reached in through the window and cut the engine.

 

"Alex Reagan?" she asked, as they came closer. "Dr. Strand? I'm glad you made it."

 

"Me too," said Alex sincerely. "It's beautiful here."

 

Elle turned to look out over the ocean as if that had never occurred to her before.

 

"Yes," she said, with distant surprise. "That's what most of the tourists say, too."

 

"You get a lot of visitors here?" asked Alex. "It seems awfully remote."

 

"Well, we're not exactly Seaside," said Elle, a faint smile playing over her face, "but we have our own attractions." She gestured out to the ocean, where the sea was burning off the top layer of mist. Alex stared, not sure what she was supposed to see. The sea-mist was lovely, but not any more than anywhere else on the North Pacific coast. It was withdrawing before her eyes, shriveling under the touch of sunlight. A white blanket of fog rolled back to reveal dark shapes emerging from the mist...

 

Alex gasped.

 

The grey ocean was still shrouded by a lingering layer of mists, but they could still clearly see the tops of enormous standing stones, rising out of the mists and the water below like pillars of a vast temple, or the body of a dead god; something primordial and holy. Looking at them, Alex felt both smaller and larger than her actual body, overawed and yet somehow proud; an odd feeling. Even as she stared out onto the ocean, the ever-detached part of her, necessary for a journalist, was trying to pin it down in words. The sight made her—for lack of a better explanation—feel glad to be alive. She felt as if she could claim kinship with the stone and the water before her merely by existing in the same world as them, as if she could feel somehow that the molecules that made up her body were one and same as the ones that made up the pillars of stone that stood before her. She was conscious of the beat of her own blood, and the little hairs on the skin of her arms. And she felt conscious of Richard, and his hand only inches from her own.

 

“Sea stacks,” said Elle succinctly. “This part of the coast is famous for them.”

 

“Impressive,” said Richard. “But I take it we’re not here to get the tour.”

 

“No,” said Elle. “I only do that for money. _This_ is important.” She looked at Alex. “Can you kayak?”

 

Alex snapped out of her reverie, offended. “Of course I can kayak,” she said.

 

“Right. And you?”

 

“I admit I never picked up the skill,” said Richard.

 

“Hmm.” Elle eyed the width of his shoulders, straining at the limits of his winter jacket. “I think you’ll do, anyway. Just don’t tip over.”

 

“Excuse you,” said Alex coldly. “What does kayaking have to do with seeing a cave painting?”

 

If Elle caught her tone, she didn’t acknowledge it. She nodded towards a narrow inlet in the cliff, a little ways down the bay. “Where do you think the cave is?”

 

She moved to the back of the pickup, while Alex gaped at her, and let down the gate, revealing three brightly painted kayaks. “I’ll need help carrying these down, by the way,” she said, and stared at them expectantly.

 

They had to make two trips down the cliff trail, the kayaks loaded with life vests and winter kayaking gear. Sitting down in the kayak, Alex felt like a child in the bulky extra layer that Elle insisted that they wear, especially when Elle busied herself around her, checking and readjusting her spray skirt for her while rattling off padding advice in a rote, matter-of-fact voice. Richard, in contrast, seemed to be taking it in stride. Alex was still looking at him when she felt the kayak begin to move.

 

“We’re not going far,” shouted Elle, as she pushed Alex out into the surf. Alex scrambled for her paddle. “Remember to go straight forward into the breakers!”

 

That was easy for her to say, Alex reflected, as droplets of salt water splashed into her face. Maybe she should have asked Elle if going kayaking on the Spokane every summer was exactly equivalent to paddling out into the ocean in the freezing cold, in the middle of December. She felt horribly off balance on the water, as if the surface of the ocean was a great beast trying to have her off, and every wave against the front of her kayak sent cold water like a slap to her face. Better than caffeine, at least—she hadn’t slept well last night, as if she ever did. The dark had whispered answers to her, but when she woke, she could remember none of them. An exercise in futility.

 

The long and narrow shape of Richard’s kayak pulled alongside her. He was, of course, a natural.

 

“Not what I envisioned,” he said, raising his voice to make himself heard over the water.

 

“You’re telling me,” said Alex. She was trying not to think about what would happen to her recording equipment if she capsized. The fog, at least, had burned off. The ocean shone faintly luminescent in the pink light of morning, sunlight peeking over the cliffs. They were closer now to the sea stacks, which seemed to loom above them, glowing amber with the sunrise. Alex was on the point of offering a remark on the view when Richard spoke.

 

“I often wonder how anyone can believe in the supernatural when the natural can be so profound.” He nodded towards the nearest of the sea stacks. “Wind and water shaped that stone. There was no sculptor save for the laws of physics. No divine hand involved, no fairies or shadows. And yet there are so many that can’t accept the majesty or splendor in front of them already.”

 

“Why, Dr. Strand,” said Alex, pleasantly surprised. “You’re a poet.”

 

He gave the short, huffing sound that passed for a laugh with him.

 

“Hardly,” he said. “I’ve been called many things, but never that.”

 

“Too romantic?” suggested Alex, to which he made no answer.

 

Elle led them about half a mile up the coast, where the cliffs grew taller and more thickly crowned with evergreens. The water calmed as they made their way into a bay, only sometimes slapping against the sides of their kayaks like a vast petulant child. There was no other sound than the discordant cries of the sea birds that swooped overhead. Alex had never been easy with silence; thankfully, Elle grew more talkative on the water.

 

“I’ve always lived here,” she said, when Alex asked. “One more semester, though, and I won’t have to come back even on holidays.”

 

“Do you not like the town?” said Alex, taken aback.

 

“I love it,” said Elle. After a moment, seeming to realize that this wasn’t sufficient explanation, she went on. “There’s something I guess I should explain about this place. You saw the lighthouse on the way in?”

 

“How could I not?” said Alex, with a shudder. Instinctively, she craned her neck to the direction of the lighthouse, but it was hidden from her by the curve of the land.

 

“It was…noticeable,” agreed Richard.

 

“I wish you hadn’t come at night,” said Elle. She shrugged. “It’s too late for that now. But the lighthouse is everything here. It was here before the town. Fact is, the town is only here because of the lighthouse.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“Desdemona Sands was founded by the lighthouse keepers,” said Elle. “Every family here is descended from one of them, or from their children. Because the lighthouse keepers…” She hesitated. “They came back. All of them. _All_ of them. There was nothing here before the lighthouse went up. But they stayed anyway, built the town from scratch. Some of them refused to leave their post, and some of them came back months and years after, like they tried to resist and couldn't, but they all came back in the end. There was something in the lighthouse that kept them here.”

 

"Perhaps the scenery," said Richard. "Is it so implausible that they may have simply liked this part of the coast and decided to settle down here?"

 

"Every single one of them?” Elle shook her head slowly. “Everything is possible, I guess. We're here."

 

"What?" said Alex, thrown by the sudden non sequitur, but then she saw the cave.

 

It was low against the water, set in the rock face. If Elle hadn’t pointed it out, Alex might have assumed it was no more than a darker piece of rock. The opening was a wide, irregular shape like a misshapen mouth, through which water sloshed slowly back and forth.

 

“Are we supposed to go in there?” she asked uneasily.

 

“It’s not dangerous, at this tide,” said Elle. “We’d better hurry, though. I don’t want to be seen bringing you here.” She retrieved a flashlight from her pocket and looped its cord around her wrist. “The drawings aren’t very far in. Come on.”

 

Richard followed after without hesitation, turning his kayak like he had been born on the water. Alex stared after their backs, gnawing her lip.

 

“I suppose we’ve come all this way,” she said, mostly to herself, and paddled after.

 

She ducked down a little as her kayak passed underneath the entrance, by instinct, although the opening was more than high enough; an uneasiness had passed over her as if transmitted with the coolness of the cave, and she felt viscerally a need to make herself smaller. Without intending it, she held her breath; ahead of her, Richard’s breathing sounded oddly regular, as if he felt the same impulse and was forcing himself to breathe normally.

 

Then they were within, the dimness startling in contrast to the crisp golden sunrise they had left behind. The ripples of their kayaks cutting through the water eddied out and faded into the dark. Her hands tightened around her paddle. It wasn't complete darkness, but Alex was grateful nevertheless for the beam of Elle’s flashlight as she pointed it back towards them, lighting their way. Light bounced off the waters around Richard’s kayak, casting luminous reflections upon his face. She paddled forward, drawn to it.

 

“It’s here,” said Elle. Her voice was oddly distorted in the confines of the cave, her face scarcely visible behind the glare of the flashlight.

 

“What’s here?” Alex asked. Her voice, too, was strange.

 

Elle only swung her flashlight in response. Alex’s gaze followed the light as it flickered over and around the recesses and crags, making shapes against the walls. At first she thought what she was seeing on the cave wall was another shadow—then her eye caught the outline of a black, spindly leg, and then another, and around them figures crawling out of a darkness blacker than the shadows. Alex ought to have known what to expect, but still she found she could not breathe.

 

“You said on your show that you’ve seen cave paintings before,” said Elle dispassionately. She was holding the flashlight with a remarkably steady hand. “Are they all like this?”

 

“Yes,” said Alex, shaken. “Yes….and no.”

 

The other paintings hadn’t had the outline of towering waves that could only represent the blood-dark sea, whose voice she could still hear outside, pressing against the mouth of the cave; nor the spiky outline of a sailing ship in the distance, sharp and somehow predatory. But the central image was the same; the grotesque figure in the center, with his upraised arms—and his upside-down face.

 

"I've been told stories for as long as I can remember of shadows crawling out of the water," said Elle, conversationally, when Alex had not moved or spoken. "Almost every night before bed. It wasn't until I went away to college that I realized that other kids had fairy tales."

 

“I think we’ve seen enough,” said Richard sharply, and the tone in his voice made Alex come abruptly back to herself. She broke her eyes away from the drawing. She felt disoriented, dizzy; she could see the shadows of the cave closing in on the corners of her vision, shifting every time she turned her head. Richard was watching her carefully. The expression on his face made her feel as if he was on the verge of saying something to her, but he only brusquely asked Elle to lead them out of the cave.

 

Daylight felt good against her face, even cloud-shrouded as it was. It warmed her, and after a few moments her fingers stopped feeling numb. She loosened them slowly around the paddle. She was conscious of Richard, still watching her as if she might break.

 

“What _were_ those?” she asked Elle. “And who drew them? That ship—it almost looked modern.”

 

“It was,” she said. “The drawings are older than the town, but only just barely. They say the last survivors of the _Desdemona_ drew them with their final breath.” She shrugged. “They also say every soul aboard the ship died instantly, so take that how you want.”

 

“The _Desdemona_? A ship?”

 

“Of course,” said Elle, surprise evident in her voice. “The one that wrecked here a hundred and fifty years ago. It’s why there’s a lighthouse.” She only shook her head, bewildered, at follow-up questions. “But everyone knows about it. I don’t know what else I could tell you.”

 

“Right,” said Alex, a little shortly. They were silent the rest of the way back, until the waves pushed them onto the shore. Elle stripped them of their gear with brusque efficiency. It wasn't until they had reached the top of the cliff, and the kayaks were loaded into the back of the pickup, that she spoke more than a few words.

 

“One more thing,” she said. “Be careful at night. The lighthouse has been more active lately. More awake. Ever since _he_ came.”

 

“He?” said Alex blankly. “Who’s he?”

 

“Knightley,” said Elle, biting out the name sharply, as if she wanted to get it out and over with. “Be careful of him.”

 

“Does he live in the town? Is he from here?”

 

Elle barked out a laugh without any humor in it. “Maybe he is from here, but not from the town.” She regarded them levelly. “You told me that you’re only staying until tomorrow?

 

“That’s our current plan,” said Alex. “We’ll see how the story unfolds.”

 

“It might unfold a little too much for you,” said Elle. “It’s up to you, but I’d consider driving up the road some before dark tonight. Find a room in one of our sister towns up the coast.”

 

Alex frowned. “Why?”

 

“Like I said, it’s up to you.”

 

"That's not an answer," she said, or tried to say; Elle had already turned away, as if she had lost interest in them between one word and the next.

 

“I can give you a ride back into town,” she offered, in a voice that had gone utterly remote.

 

“Thanks,” said Alex, “but I think we’d benefit from the time to think.”

 

Elle shrugged, as if that was only as much as she had been expecting, and slid into the seat of her truck. Within a moment she was gone, with only one hand raised out the window to say goodbye.

 

“That was—” Richard paused.

 

“Not very informative. I know.”

 

“She did show us the sea cave,” he said. His voice was carefully neutral. “I take it you found it interesting.”

 

“Yeah—more than interesting. I wish I’d taken photos. I don’t think Elle will take us back there again.”

 

“No. I wouldn’t think so.”

 

Alex stuck her hands in her pockets. “Who knows how much of the audio will be salvageable, under all that kayaking gear,” she said. “At least we’ll spend the rest of the day on dry land.”

 

“You have more interviews lined up, I suppose. Do you think they’ll be more forthcoming with what they know?”

 

“I hope so,” said Alex dismally, beginning to strike down the road towards the town. “It’s not much of a radio story otherwise.”

 

“I wouldn’t worry,” said Richard, without any change in tone. “You know that I’d be more than willing to supply yet another interview on apophenia. I could diagnose the entire town if you wanted.”

 

Alex paused.

 

“Are you— _teasing_ me, Dr. Strand?”

 

"I was making an attempt at humor, yes. Is it working?"

 

Despite herself, a smile was tugging at the corner of her mouth. She relented.

 

"It wasn't bad for a first attempt,” Alex allowed. “Poetry _and_ humor in one day—soon you’ll be a real boy.”

 

Richard said, gravely: “Something to look forward to, I’m sure,” and Alex laughed outright.

 

The wind was picking up at their backs, blowing them to the town and its small collection of roofs, visible above the curve of the road.

 

“The historical society should be just off the main road,” said Alex, peering at her directions. “Next to some pine trees, on the seaward side—seaward? Who talks like that?”

 

“Someone who spends more time with books than with people, I imagine,” said Richard. The woman outside the town grocer, which had been closed on their way out this morning, paused in redecorating her window display to stare at them as they walked past.

 

The letters in the window said:

 

THE SHIP

IS

COMING.

 

If there was more to the message, it was left unfinished. They walked on.

 

* * *

 

 

The historical society wasn’t what she expected.

 

“Oh my god,” said Alex, completely involuntary. She searched for something more appropriate to say, and came up empty. “Oh my _god_. Um, sorry. You uh, have such unique decorations.”

 

The inside of the room they had just entered was covered entirely with pictures, framed and unframed, of the lighthouse. They covered all four walls, crowding against each other and making the room seem smaller. A poster of it even clung to the battered and unpainted interior door that led to the rest of the house. On a side table by the lone, mothworn sofa sat a ceramic replica of the lighthouse, as sullen as the original. Alex stared at it all, appalled.

 

"Come in, my dear, get out of the cold," said the old man, genially. "Yes, quite interesting, aren't they? I believe this is one of the most complete photographic collections of any lighthouse in Oregon. Here we even have a sketch from an artist commissioned just after construction was finished. You can see the gradual effects of weathering on the sides over time—and here a very fascinating before and after comparison of the roof retiling in 1927—hasn't been touched since, and what a pity. I am quite certain the county has been deliberately ignoring my letters on the subject."

 

He blinked owlishly at them through his spectacles, which were old fashioned enough to have come back into style again.

 

"Ah, enough about me," he said. "This is an unusual season to see tourists here—but rewarding, very rewarding! You must tell me what brought to our little town of Desdemona Sands."

 

"Um. I'm a reporter, actually," said Alex, awkwardly shaking his papery hand. "I've exchanged some emails with you on the subject. Alex Reagan? From Pacific Northwest Stories?"

 

“Ah, I see,” said the man, with no signs of recognition whatsoever. “Delighted, my dear, and I am Dr. Hampstead. And you are—”

 

"Richard Strand," said Richard, shaking his hand in his turn. "We have an interest in the history of your town. I'm told that the lighthouse plays an important role in the founding."

 

“Oh dear, yes,” said Dr. Hampstead, his eyes lighting up. “Did you know, this little part of the coast was entirely uninhabited before the lighthouse was established. A waste, an unutterable waste. Luckily, when the _Desdemona_ wrecked off the coastline here, the governor at the time had the foresight to put in our wonderful little lighthouse, bringing people to the area for the first time. After that, it didn’t take long for settlers to realize the advantages of the spot, and soon enough we became the incorporated town of Desdemona Sands. They’ll say the town will last for as long as the lighthouse stands, which will be a long time yet, I’m sure.”

 

“I’m sure,” said Alex slowly. “And—all of these pictures? They’re all of the lighthouse?”

 

“Every single one,” said Dr. Hampstead, beaming.

 

Alex turned slowly in a circle, taking them all in.  “This one isn’t.”

 

“No,” said Richard unexpectedly. “That one was taken from inside the lighthouse.”

 

“ _Inside the lighthouse?_ ”

 

“It was occupied until relatively recently, you know,” said the historian disapprovingly. “Before it was decommissioned it was operated continuously.”

 

“Of course,” said Alex, taking deep breaths. Yes, that made sense. It was an actual lighthouse; it would have had keepers over the years. Elle had told her as much. “Right. Yes. Um—” She glanced at the picture again. It had clearly been given pride of place, enlarged despite the grainy quality and framed in the very center of the wall.

 

The photographer had been looking out over the Pacific, at some point in the twilight between sunset and true dark. His subject was nothing very interesting; from the lighthouse, the legendary sea stacks of the Oregon coast weren’t even visible. A mist had come down from the cliffs and was shrouding the sea, presenting a grey wall.

 

In that mist was a blocky shape; barely even recognizable _as_ a shape, instead of merely a darker shadow within the shrouding greyness. Alex had the unavoidable sensation that it was approaching them, somehow. There were shadows in the corners of the frame.

 

Without taking her eyes off the picture, Alex said:

 

 “Dr. Hampstead, what can you tell us about the wreck of the _Desdemona_ , herself? Is—is the town named after the ship?”

 

“Certainly not. The town is named after the small spit of land where the _Desdemona_ ran aground, and _that_ is what is named after the ship. As for information on the wreck—well, I’m not at all surprised that you haven’t heard of it, public education being what it is. It really ought to be more famous. But there’s another ship whose story is similar to hers, and that you might already know,” said Dr. Hampstead. “The _Valencia_.”

 

Alex jerked away from the picture. She felt a thrill of fear at the name; a fear that the journalistic part of her mind was already categorizing and attempting to put into words for listeners.

 

Any child growing up in the coastal parts of the Pacific Northwest knew the _Valencia_. A hideous wreck, one hundred years ago, had burned into the collective consciousness of the region. Occasional sightings of her, in the rocky bay where she had died, kept the legend alive.

 

“She floundered within sight of land,” said Alex slowly. “Men, women, and children, sinking slowly into the sea as the women sang hymns. People watched from the cliffs but couldn’t get to them because of the storm and the waves.” She drew a deep breath. “And then—after—the ship—”

 

“Lived on,” finished Dr. Hampstead, who had been watching her smilingly. “It sank, and yet was seen again many times in the century to come.”

 

“Apophenia,” said Richard calmly.

 

“Oh, certainly,” said the historian, to Alex’s faint surprise. “But a ship stays in people’s hearts. And the _Desdemona_ has certainly stayed in ours. Unlike the _Valencia_ , there weren’t any survivors here on our beach. The first rescuers who reached them reported them all beyond any help, and what remained of the ship already drifting back out to sea. All we have are a few pages from the captain’s diary, which had been stuffed into his pocket.”

 

“May we see them?”

 

Dr. Hampstead chuckled.

 

“I’m not surprised by your curiosity. I’ve often found the logs to be a wealth of information. The doodles are, of course, distracting, but the captain kept meticulous detail on the weather readings, latitude and longitude, and other useful facts…none of which shed any light on the fact of the wreck itself, of course, but one works with what one can…” He opened the unpainted door with a creak and wandered into the other room, still muttering.

 

Alex took a tentative half-step after him, not sure if they were meant to follow or not, but the old man did not seem to be paying attention to her in the least, and the hallway beyond the door was cobwebbed and dim. She hesitated on the threshold, then went instead to join Richard at the window.

 

The promised snow had begun to fall, and it drifted hazily across the view from the window. Alex let herself be entranced for a moment, standing at the window next to the solid warmth of Richard’s body, staring at the big, cottonball flakes that were falling with a snow-globe dreaminess. It didn’t snow like this in Seattle, not often, anyway. Alex could not dispel the bizarre, fleeting sensation that they were inside a greeting card.

 

“When’s the last time you’ve seen it snow like this?” she asked softly. She only realized Richard was as enthralled as she was when he didn’t move to take his eyes off the snow.

 

“I must have been a child,” he said. “At my father’s house. My sister and I watched it come down for hours…” With a visible effort he shook himself.

 

“Snow becomes less awe-inspiring as an adult, of course,” he noted dryly. “As with most of life, the change happens right around the time one has to shovel it.”

 

She nudged him with her shoulder. “Oh, just enjoy it, you big grinch.”

 

He looked down at her then, and Alex was startled to see that he was smiling.

 

“Who says I’m not?” he asked, and then the door opened and for no real reason at all both of them took a step back from each other.

 

“And here they are!” called the happy voice of the historian, coming back in through the door. He set a ratty cardboard box down on the table. There are a few equally ratty documents sliding around like dry leaves at the bottom. Alex was no archivist, but she was pretty sure this was not how it was supposed to be done.

 

“These are the captain’s logs?”

 

“What’s left of them,” said Dr. Hampstead. “The bulk of his papers were lost with the ship.”

 

“When you say the ship is lost,” said Richard politely, interjecting, “you don’t mean wrecked, do you? It drifted away on the next tide.”

 

Dr. Hampstead agreed that was so. “Although we refer to it as a wreck, for reasons of tourism, frankly—”

 

“Does that strike you as normal?” asked Alex, catching onto Richard’s train of thought. “The crew all dead on the sandbar, but the ship intact enough to simply—drift away? I mean, they must have all gotten off the ship voluntarily.”

 

“I’m hardly an expert on shipwrecks,” said Dr. Hampstead loftily. “Now, my dear, I hope you are ready to be fascinated—”

 

The captain’s logs were fascinating, but not for the reasons Dr. Hampstead seemed to think. He liked to point out the latitude and longitude, miles covered, wind direction, cloud cover, seemingly for the purpose of making Alex’s eyes glaze over. She was more drawn to the scribbles along the side, barely legible and dark. There, the captain had written notes, seemingly to himself. One read;

 

_It cannot be stowaway. Lars & Holm turnd over all of hold. No one. But too many at dinner tonight. How?_

 

Another read:

 

_Witchcraft? Foolish thought. Will try anything however. Faces in shadow…_

 

Alex turned through the pages, beginning to ignore the main part of the log entirely. At some point the log itself began to grow shorter and more perfunctory, the rest of the page taken up in great swirling pools of ink, forming into a bulbous head, a thin frame, long, long fingers and limbs. Alex stared at them, shadow figures on one page after another, until the afterimage was imprinted on her eyes and the room darkened with phantom shadows. She blinked hard, and with an effort tore her eyes away.

 

“These drawings,” she began.

 

“I really must urge you not to pay them any mind,” said Dr. Hampstead, frowning at her.

 

“They look almost exactly the same as the figures in the cave drawings in the bay right outside your town,” said Alex. “Were you aware of that?”

 

“Cave drawings?” said Dr. Hampstead. “Really, now. I have no idea who told you that, but you are very mistaken. This area certainly has no such thing.”

 

“So you’re telling me that there are no local stories of shadow people in this town. The kind of stories children here grow up with.”

 

“Absolutely not,” said Dr. Hampstead, pale and determined.

 

“But—” Alex paused. Dr. Hampstead’s liver-spotted hands were shaking. He picked up a manilla folder, would-be casually, and dropped it into the cardboard box, as if to cover something at the bottom. Until now, Alex had presumed it was empty.

 

“Alex,” said Richard, cutting into the conversation, “take a look at these.”

 

He was calling her attention to two logs, dated one after the other. The first:

 

_33.623 N 127.964 W 221 nautical miles covered today, brsk wind NNE. Speed 9 knots, up to 15. Flat sea, no sign of land. Hands ate mash tonite, salt pork gone fetid overnight._

 

The rest of the log was taken up by the same shadow figure, accompanied by only one note at the side: _more of them now._

 

“Now look at the next day’s log,” said Richard. Alex leaned over the broad expanse of his shoulder to take a look, her chin brushing the wool of his sweater.

 

_33.623 N 127.964 W 240 (est) nautical miles covered today, avg spd 10 knots. Weather fine &clear. No birds. Crew ate well on salt pork and grog._

 

Below that he had written, in a cramped hand:

 

_This is not the sea we know, not outside Californiay or anywhere else. Sun is strange in the sky. Shadows grow blacker. Faces on wrong._

 

"Faces on wrong," she read. "Do you think...?"

 

"Perhaps," said Richard. "That's not what stands out to me." He set the two logs side by side. It took Alex a moment to see it.

 

"Oh," she said. "How is that possible?"

 

"It's not," said Richard. "The captain may have written it out wrong, or perhaps it's another symptom of his obviously escalating mental illness."

 

"Maybe," said Alex. "Or maybe—"

 

"Maybe the ship ran 240 miles and still ended up at the same latitude and longitude?"

 

"Well—" she threw her hands up and reached for her phone. “Richard, look. According to the map, those coordinates are about 200 miles off the coast to San Francisco. Dr. Hampstead,” she said, raising her voice slightly, and the man started, having apparently been deep in contemplation of one of the photos on the wall. “Where was the _Desdemona_ originally bound?”

 

“She was running the route from New York to San Francisco, coming up through Panama,” he said, pushing his spectacles up. “The wind must have blown her quite far off course—”

 

“Very far,” agreed Richard. “Particularly as a north-north-east wind would have sent the ship running _south_.”

 

“Oh,” said Dr. Hampstead feebly. “Yes, of course.”

 

“I have one more question,” said Alex. “You must know every person in the town.”

 

“I do, yes,” said Dr. Hampstead with real enthusiasm, seeming to regain himself slightly. “It’s a small town, you know. And of course, genealogy is something of a pet project of mine.”

 

“Have you ever heard of a man named Knightley? I understand he’s new to town.”

 

“Oh no,” said the historian, in shock. “Who told you that? The Knightleys are a very old family in this town. Very old. Quite distinguished.”

 

“Distinguished,” repeated Alex. “In what way, distinguished? Actually—you know, I can’t imagine you don’t have genealogical records of the town. That must be _amazing_ to see. I’d _love_ to have a look at all your hard work.”

 

She could feel Richard eyeballing her. Maybe she was laying it on a bit thick, but Dr. Hampstead lit up like a Christmas light.

 

“Would you really, my dear? Then—you know, I don’t suppose I could refuse! I will be just one moment, my dear, only one moment—”

 

Feeling only slightly ashamed of herself, Alex dove for the box as soon as the historian had toddled out of the room. There was one page left; the final page of the captain's log. It held no words, only a drawing.

 

It was of an upside-down face.

 

* * *

 

 

The genealogical records told them nothing very interesting. The Knightleys had been living in Desdemona Sands since 1862, and currently had one living descendant, Jonathan Knightley, in his late thirties. A pang of guilt prevented their immediate escape out the door; Alex spent another twenty minutes mustering as much enthusiasm as she could over every page, while Richard only sat and raised his eyebrows at her.

 

“What a performance,” he said, as soon as they were out the door and into the snow-blown street.

 

“Oh, shut up,” said Alex, feeling her cheeks turn red. “I just wanted to see what he was hiding.” She brought out her phone, studied the quick picture she had taken of the page. It was there, staring back at her; eyes and a mouth defined more by their blankness than anything else, surrounded by mad swirling lines of black that formed a head, a neck, an afterthought of a body, thin as a knife.

 

“I’m not sure I would go so far as to say he was hiding it,” Richard observed mildly. He ducked his head as a sudden gust of wind blew snow into his face, hunching far enough out of the wind that their faces were nearly on the same level, inches apart. His body was a welcome windbreak, warm and broad at her side. Alex repressed an urge to brush the wind-blown hair back from his forehead. What was wrong with her?

 

“Where to next, then?” asked Richard, snapping on his gloves. The wind had died down as suddenly as it had come, and the street was once more a soft dream of falling snow as they walked down into the center of town. “Unless you were proposing that we accost strangers to ask about shadow men—”

 

He stopped abruptly at the top of the slope leading down into the town square. Alex managed only a few steps past him, her feet stuttering to a halt as she saw what was waiting for them in the town square.

 

Alex had done some research before arriving in town. Desdemona Sands was only home to a little more than five hundred people.

 

About one hundred of them were standing in the square. Some were in groups, some standing alone; most in winter jackets but some, disconcertingly, wearing only thin layers against the winter chill. Alex was sure that she and Richard stood out in such a small town. But even so, she didn’t think they had warranted a reception like this: every single person in square had turned to look at them as they had walked down the road, as if they had been waiting.

 

One hundred people all together should have been talking, stamping feet, spilling coffee, making noise; but they were still and silent among the soft falling snow. A crunching sound behind her made her startle, her heart flying up to her throat, but it was not—not some wild figure from her nightmares, it was Richard, only Richard, drawing level to her. His shoulder pressing into hers made her feel braver, and she stepped forward down the hill and into the square, slipping one hand into her pocket to switch on her recorder.

 

It was a small town, so it was a small town square, really only an intersection that had been pushed back on all sides, with signs all around warning cars to drive slowly. One hundred people made it crowded, but no one moved to make space as Alex and Richard walked in among them. Alex stared at this bit of rudeness, completely bewildered as to what to make of it. People had been hostile to her before—she _was_ a reporter—but the people surrounding them on all sides were not being hostile. They weren’t muttering, or glaring at them with hate in their eyes, or shoving too hard as they passed them on the street. They were simply standing there, an eerie forest planted in the concrete of the road. Then, after a moment, they did begin to part, but not for them. Someone was coming through the still, staring crowd and towards them.

 

Alex didn’t know what she had expected, but what appeared before them was only an ordinary man, with an ordinary face, and a smile as thin as a knife. There was an odd, shiny scar on his cheek.

 

“Hi there,” he said. “How are you?”

 

His voice was perfectly ordinary too, even in a sea of blank and unmoving faces. There was something chilling about the even, rehearsed tone of his voice, as if he had once seen a man acting normal, in an instructional video, perhaps. Richard and Alex said nothing, and he waited out the silence as if waiting for them to return the greeting. At last he continued.

 

“My ears were burning,” he said, smiling. “I understand you’re the reporter? I think your next interview is with me.”

 

“And you are?” said Alex, although she thought she already knew. There was a cold feeling in her stomach.

 

“Jonathan Knightley,” he said. “It’s a pleasure. You’ve heard a lot about me, I think.”

 

“Not as much as one would hope,” she said. “Are you suggesting that I interview you right now, on this street?”

 

“We could go somewhere indoors,” he suggested, and stamped his boots in the snow as if he was cold, an oddly rehearsed gesture. Around them, a few of the people in the crowd seemed to suddenly remember that it was winter. They stamped their feet in the snow too, all of them moving at once like an eerie, synchronized dance.

 

“No,” said Alex, too fast. “We’d prefer not to go anywhere with you.”

 

“Oh?” said Knightley. “But aren’t you curious at all?”

 

Alex narrowed her eyes. “Curious about—”

 

“The lighthouse, of course.”

 

Instinctively Alex turned her head to look. In less than half a day she seemed to have formed a magnetic orientation to the lighthouse: she found that she didn’t need to look to find it. Alex was looking straight at it, through a gap in the people who surrounded them, through a gap in the nearby storefronts. Coincidence, perhaps, but Alex had the strangest feeling that she could have been surrounded by concrete walls and still would have found a way to see the lighthouse.

 

Daylight had not made it any more benevolent, any less alive. It crouched on its pilings like so many legs, looking back at her, smiling a thin little smile—

 

Richard shouldered his way into her line of vision, breaking it. He eclipsed her view of the lighthouse; instead Alex could only see his face.

 

"I doubt you could tell us anything more concrete than what we already know," he said tonelessly. He sounded almost bored, dismissive; but beneath it Alex could hear a loaded spring winding back. "We've already been to the historical society."

 

"Dr. Hampstead is a good friend of mine," said Knightley. "A very good friend. His understanding, however...is limited. He hoards facts as if they were a sailor's treasure; the dates of construction, the years of storms, the minutes of petty local councils. The feeble knowledge of human rationality. What little things he knows, and can tell you, are ultimately meaningless. There is much more that I can explain to you; much that you have spent countless hours in the dark of night wondering, much that you long to know."

 

He spoke to Richard, but Alex could feel his eyes go right through her. In the light of a swirling grey afternoon blurred with snow, it seemed to her that his eyes were lambent, lit as if by an inner flame.

 

"I assume by that you mean you want an opportunity to trade gossip about the local superstitions," said Richard. He was still managing to sound bored, even a little condescending. He eyed the crowd around them. “And it seems that you’ve even gathered something of a following around the concept. Let me guess, only you can reveal the truth to them. You alone can lead them to salvation. You must be always followed and never questioned. Do they give you their money and possessions as well? If they haven’t yet, I’m certain they will soon.”

 

The strange light in Knightley’s eyes burned brighter.

 

“No,” he said. In his voice Alex could hear a sea-wind coming. “I have no need for the mundane materials of this thin world. And none who understand the path of the light could question me. Once the truth is known, there can _be_ no questioning it.”

 

“I understand completely. You’ve found yourself a number of village idiots and you’re bilking them for all that they’re worth. It’s shameful. But I’m sure you see yourself as the hero of this sordid tale.”

 

“I see myself as that lighthouse,” said Knightley with a pulled-tight smile, pointing to the squat stone tower on the headland. “My job is to warn innocent travelers, unwary of the treachery of the ocean, away from the shoals that break them. You, my friend, are the shoals.”

 

“That lighthouse has been defunct for forty-three years,” said Richard calmly.

 

The smile got tighter.

 

“I know you,” he said. “Storm-bringer.”

 

Richard raised his eyebrows. “How poetic. My words for you are a little more mundane: charlatan. Fraud. Cult leader.”

 

Knightley said no word, made no gesture. But as one, the crowd took a single step forward, like a forest marching upon them. It was suddenly much more crowded than it had been before. Everywhere Alex looked there was a wall of bodies, an immoveable mass that made it suddenly hard to breathe. They took another step.

 

“Richard,” she said, in a voice a little tighter than she would have liked. “Maybe you could have poked the bear at a later, more convenient time?”

 

“They’re not going to harm us,” said Richard, calm and sure. The crowd took another step closer. Alex could see a strange paleness in their eyes, as if they were lost in an unseen mist. She edged closer to Richard’s unmoving mass. Alex remembered her recorder, still running in her pocket, and tried to be brave for the audience listening at home.

 

“I hope that’s your latent psychic powers speaking,” she said, “because they really do look like they’re going to harm us.”

 

Her voice trembled. Absurdly, she found herself hoping that Nick would give her last words a sympathetic edit. The crowd was beginning to press against her body now, an anonymous crush of flesh. Blind panic overtook her, and she flailed out wildly. Her knuckles caught against flesh and gristle: she had broken someone’s nose. Her hand came back bloody. She stared in the eyes of the woman she had hit, whose nose was now bloody and off-center; the woman stared back, utterly placid and remote. Her pupils were tiny pinpricks, as if she were blinded by a light that only she could see. As if they all were.

 

“What’s all this?” said a voice from outside the crowd. “Did someone forget my invitation for the welcoming committee? Guys, don’t suffocate the poor tourists—don’t you know we need them to give us good Tripadvisor reviews? Let me through, let me through…Christ alive, Mrs. Denson, what happened to your poor nose? Not to take the Lord’s name in vain, of course.”

 

Alex could barely even make sense of the babble. Across from her, the woman blinked once, slowly, and brought one hand up to her nose. She stared at the blood on her fingertip as if she had no idea how it had gotten there.

 

“Sedgewick,” said Knightley’s voice, from somewhere within the crowd. “Didn’t mean to exclude you from our gathering.”

 

A stranger had worked his way through the crowd, gently shoving the unmoving out of his way to stand next to Alex and Richard. He was a big, burly presence in a slightly undersized fleece jacket that opened at the chest to reveal an utterly incongruous priest’s collar.

 

“Oh, think nothing of it,” he said cheerfully. “You know I never check email. I miss these things all the time. Tyson!” he said suddenly, and a young man clad only in a plaid shirt blinked and started back. “What are you doing without your jacket? Your mother will be heartbroken if you catch cold. And Darlena, shouldn’t you be minding the shop? I’ll make these folks welcome, don’t you worry—no need to get out the residents council—hiya, Tom, how d’you do, Mr. Mason—”

 

As he called their names they seemed to blink, to wake up. Some of them seemed to feel the cold again, and wrapped their arms around themselves; a few, at the edges, began to wander away, looking for all the world as if they had only been temporarily distracted by an errand.

 

Knightley’s eyes were gleaming, ablaze.

 

“Tomorrow,” he said smilingly, backing away. “When the sun goes down. You’ll find your answers at the lighthouse. It will tell you everything you wanted to know. Meet me there.”

 

“Why?” said Alex. “What will you tell us? What is the lighthouse?”

 

He had gone. Around them were the people of the town, quite normally, and calmly, going about their business, disappearing into the snow-driven afternoon. The big stranger beside them looked after them wistfully.

 

“I never even get this many people to show up for Christmas service,” he said to them, as if what had happened had been nothing out of the ordinary. “Might be a moot question by then anyway, of course.”

 

“Are you expecting something to happen?” said Richard, also seeming utterly unperturbed. “It’s only five days away.”

 

“You know how life is in small towns,” he said. “Anything could happen.”

 

“I’m sorry, but who are you?” said Alex, out of her depth. “And what was that? And who is that—that— _Knightley_ guy? What just _happened_?”

 

He blinked down at her, adjusting his priest’s collar in a sheepish way. Alex mentally debated how she would describe the man for the radio, if she could ever make this into something fit to air. Like St. Francis of Assisi, maybe, if he was also a lumberjack. His hair was a brown-black mess that only needed a baby bird to complete it.

 

“I suppose I didn’t introduce myself, did I? Sorry, sorry…Well, most people here just call me Sedgewick, or Sedge—technically they should call me Father Sedgewick, but it’s like I told the bishop, I’m just not ready to be a parent. Ha! Sorry, little joke. Are you the journalist?”

 

“Possibly,” said Alex cautiously. “I am _a_ journalist. What makes you ask?”

 

“Well, you keep going around asking people questions, that’s a big clue,” he said thoughtfully. “Would you like another interview?”

 

“On…?”

 

“You’re interested in the supernatural, aren’t you? The Church would say that I’m the spiritual guide of the town, or I’m supposed to be. I like to think I can offer some insight. If nothing else, I can provide sandwiches and beer.”

 

Alex hesitated. “You can understand if I don’t especially want to follow anyone anywhere, right now.”

 

“I’m not sure if I would prefer to stand out on the street,” Richard pointed out. “If we’re going to be debating brainwashed zealots again, I’d like to be warm.”

 

It was a fair point—his questionable use of the word “debating” aside—and Alex had to admit that she was ravenous: neither she nor Richard had eaten anything other than an unappetizing pastry snatched from the hotel’s free breakfast that morning.

 

“I’m completely harmless, I promise,” said Sedgewick, apparently in complete earnest. “Aside from, I suppose, the argument to be made on the inherent harmfulness of all institutionalized religion, in which case I promise neither to murder nor to proselytize.”

 

Richard snorted, and Alex had to admit that it was hard to be afraid of this man.

 

They followed him up a road going straight up the side of a steep hill, heading directly away from the ocean. Alex had to force herself not to turn around and check if anyone was following: in the snow that was falling, she doubted she’d be able to see them anyway.

 

The church was on the very crest of the hill: a very ordinary looking brick building with a cross on the door and a steep-gabled roof, a charming picture marred only by an outsized bell tower, rising twice as high as the church itself, and seeming almost to take up as much room. It was as if the church was built an afterthought to the bell tower. Christmas decorations crowded incandescently in its shadow. Pinwheels spun and stuttered in the falling snow, bright lights glowing from underneath a gathering blanket of white, an inflatable Santa bobbing back and forth in the breeze. Glittering reindeer leapt across the church yard, and in their midst the familiar nativity scene was laid out; the three wise men, Joseph in the posture of a wise patriarch, Mary in blue, the baby in the manger. Someone had painted their faces black.

 

“Vandalism,” said Sedgewick. His voice was utterly toneless, as if he had decided that if he couldn’t be cheerful, he wouldn’t be anything at all. “I’ve sanded the paint off so many times by now that I’ve worn them smooth. Even beneath that black, there aren’t any faces left.” He turned away, breaking a path through the snow. Alex stayed a minute longer, looking at the desecrated decorations before her. There was something strangely sad about the sight, something a little desperate in that pool of colored lights against the darkness. Then Richard touched her arm, and they followed Sedgewick around the back of the church and up the stairs to the pastor’s quarters.

 

The decorations were more subdued inside, strings of welcoming lights looping from the ceiling in a surprisingly tasteful display, and a Christmas tree decorated with old-fashioned Polaroids tied on with twine. Alex leaned in to inspect the pictures.

 

“My congregation,” said Sedgewick, pride coming into his voice and lending it warmth again. “And some neighbors, and the locals at the bar, and some teenagers that wanted to take selfies.”

 

Alex could see faces she recognized on the tree. They had surrounded her and Richard not moments ago. It was surreal, horrifying, to see them with life in their eyes, smiling.

 

“What happened to them?” she asked. She saw the face of the woman whose nose she had broken, touched it. She was giving the picture-taker an indulgent smile, her arms around two young girls who had her hair and eyes.

 

“What do you mean?” he said. “Nothing’s happened to them.”

 

Alex whirled around.

 

“You must be kidding me,” she snapped. “After what we just saw in the street—you really mean to tell me that nothing happened?”

 

“Well,” he said uneasily. “It’s a small town, it’s easy to fall in with a bad crowd around here. But I still see them at the store, and services. You know, sometimes.”

 

“A bad crowd,” said Alex coldly, and then restrained herself. It was clear she needed to take a roundabout approach to that topic.

 

“Is there a story behind the bell tower?” she asked instead. “I wouldn’t think such a church in such a small town would need it.”

 

“A story?” Sedgewick seemed genuinely startled by the thought. “I shouldn’t think so, no. We don’t even have bells in the church anymore. Don’t know if we ever did, as a matter of fact. Once a year I round up some volunteers to clean out the bat dung and that’s about it.”

 

“And how long have you been the minister here?”

 

“Nineteen years this September,” said Sedgewick proudly. “My first post after I graduated seminary. The position had been empty for a while, so you can imagine the disrepair. But I’ve fallen in love with this position, and Desdemona Sands. Now I can’t bear the thought of ever leaving it.”

 

He turned to look out the window as he said this, although the only thing that was visible was snow, as if having named it, he couldn’t resist looking out on his town.

 

“It’s too bad about this weather,” he remarked. “From this window you can usually see the entire town, the beach, the rocks, everything.”

 

“The lighthouse?”

 

Sedgewick hesitated. “Well,” he said, drawing the curtain closed. “Yes, in fact. But it’s a really nice view otherwise.”

 

“You don’t like the lighthouse?”

 

“I don’t look at it much.”

 

“You’re avoiding the question,” said Richard. “Why is that?”

 

“It’s nothing personal,” said Sedgewick, after a minute. “It’s a question I habitually try to avoid.” He heaved a sigh. “I rehearsed this in my head. It’s easier when you’re at a pulpit. No interruptions. I should start again, shouldn’t I? I guess it starts with you.”

 

“With me?” said Alex, startled.

 

“I wasn’t being completely forthright,” he said. “I know who you are because I listen to your program. I think that’s how we all know you.”

 

“Always nice to meet my fans,” said Alex.

 

Sedgewick frowned. “You’re not this sarcastic on the radio,” he said. There was a small, absurd note of accusation in his voice.

 

“I have a good editor. What did you mean by ‘that’s how we _all_ know you?’ ”

 

“Just what I meant. We all listen. Maybe because we all…knew, or guessed, that something would bring you to our town someday.”

 

“A local teenager wrote to me to come,” said Alex. “Did you know that was going to happen?”

 

“I’d hoped it wouldn’t. I can’t help but feel that you have a tendency to—uh, how should I say this? Accelerate the situation. But maybe it’ll turn out better this way. Half a chance is better than no chance, right? I think that’s what Elle was hoping.”

 

Richard cleared his throat. “And how exactly do you think we’re going to accelerate the situation here?”

 

“You’ve already done it,” said Sedgewick. “Long before you ever stepped foot here. If there’s a truth out there, I think you must striking closer to the heart of it, because ever since your program aired, the evil in this town has begun to creep out of the darkness. Become bolder. You saw that lighthouse on the way into town, haven’t you?”

 

“People keep asking,” said Alex lightly. “Yes, of course. How could we _not_? But everyone seems reluctant to tell us anything about it. Well, other than—”

 

“Other than old Dr. Hampstead,” finished Sedgewick. “Poor old guy, but I have to respect his dedication. He worships that lighthouse.” A frowning line appeared between his eyes momentarily. “Figuratively, I suppose.”

 

“Right. Well, we’re hoping that someone will tell us why everyone seems to be obsessed with it. And what did you mean by—” Alex paused. “—the evil in your town?”

 

“I take it you mean in a supernatural sense,” said Richard disdainfully.

 

Sedgewick hesitated. “You know, I’m a perfectly respectable Methodist,” he said. “Just so we’re clear. In case my old mentors at seminary are listening.”

 

“I’m sure they aren’t,” said Alex dryly. “I don’t think seminaries like me very much at the moment.”

 

“Oh, well in _that_ case. I suppose I don’t have an excuse. Would you like a drink before we begin?”

 

“Whatever you’re having is fine.”

 

“Porters for the men, then, and for the lady?”

 

“No reason the lady won’t have the same,” said Alex with a thin smile. She had no intention of getting drunk, but she felt dangerously nervy. She felt she might cut herself on the knife in her throat.

 

Sedgewick brought back the beers, and then went back for sandwich meat and bread piled high on a tray. Despite her hunger, Alex put the tray to the side, to eat after the interview. She thought the beer might make Sedgewick more talkative, but she was damned if she was going to have _chewing_ sounds on her audio.

 

Sedgewick took a long draught and began.

 

 “If I were a superstitious man—that is, a believer in entities other than God—I might say that you cast a light on some things that prefer to live in the darkness. Our little town has existed in, more or less, peace for—well, some time. Until recently.”

 

“Your town’s history goes back to the founding of the lighthouse, doesn’t it?” said Richard, calm and even as always.

 

“I suppose that was the starting point, yes. The beginning of human habitation here. Most of the families here are descended—”

 

“We heard, yes.”

 

“I often wonder if that’s why Knightley was able to get the traction that he has. He…always seemed like a normal guy. Maybe something happened to him out in Wichita.”

 

“Wait,” said Alex, thrown. “Wichita?”

 

Sedgewick shrugged. “He always said he was going to get as far away from any coast as he could. He moved away twelve years ago, and only came back a couple of months ago.”

 

“I see.”

 

“But the lighthouse—that’s really the linchpin of what’s happening to this town. I don’t think we’ll ever really know what the lighthouse was built for—or if we do, we almost certainly won’t have any time to enjoy the knowledge.”

 

“We were told the lighthouse was built in response to the wreck of the _Desdemona_ ,” said Richard calmly. “It’s not an uncommon reaction to shipwrecks.”

 

Sedgewick shook his head, slowly. “You build a lighthouse to prevent shipwrecks.”

 

“Yes. And?”

 

“The lighthouse wouldn’t have saved the _Desdemona_.”

 

There was silence in the room. Sedgewick tapped his thumb on the neck of his bottle, absently, and continued. “No one on that ship died because of a shipwreck. Someone—something—had killed them. The crew were found with their necks snapped. Their heads had been turned all the way around.”

 

“Faces on wrong…” Alex murmured to herself.

 

“The lighthouse isn’t here to save ships,” Sedgewick went on. “It’s here to call something…else.”

 

“Hmm. And what basis is there for this…interesting theory?”

 

 “None, of course,” Sedgewick said easily. “It’s just local superstition, and I’m not a superstitious man.”

 

“What else do the superstitions say?” asked Alex, her mouth suddenly dry.

 

“The usual, really. Our souls will be saved, or damned, depending on your point of view, the town will be renewed, or destroyed, or something much more complicated. Something is going to come for us, anyway, and then the world—our world, anyway—will come to an end. And if I had to guess, I’d say this is all happening tomorrow.”

 

“Jesus,” said Alex.

 

“You seem remarkably calm about all this,” Richard pointed out.

 

He smiled at them, lines crinkling around his eyes. “It’s not the end of the world,” he said. “It’s just the end of one small town. We won’t be the first to go out into the dark. We probably won’t be the last.”

 

Alex could only stare at him, shocked silent. Sedgewick shrugged.

 

“You seem to think the end will come all at once, and can be averted all at once. There’s something romantic to that idea, I have to admit. And yet—maybe whatever is coming doesn’t want to swallow the world in one big gulp. Maybe it wants to nibble away at us, bit by bit. Maybe our little, beautiful town of Desdemona Sands makes the perfect aperitif for the main course—or maybe you’ll avert the end, whatever it is, and it doesn’t get to gorge on the world after all. It’ll only go back to the way it was before; eating away at us a bit at a time, here and there, until little by little we give way into nothingness, reaching the same absolute end by the scenic route—that’s what I might say, you know, if I were a superstitious man.”

 

* * *

 

 

They walked back to the dubious sanctuary of the hotel. Somewhere up above the snow, dark had fallen. They were walking through the black and white landscape of the town, the outlines of the houses softened by snow and shadows. Aside from Sedgewick’s church, there were no Christmas decorations anywhere in the entire town, nothing to mar the monochromatic beauty of Desdemona Sands at night. She couldn’t say that it surprised her. She was thinking about towns disappearing into the dark; the ghostly remains of old gold rush towns, the slow slide into obscurity. Would anyone notice if a town this small vanished off the map? There had to be those that would. Tourists, merchants, friends, coworkers. Elle, surely, had a circle of friends at college. Sedgewick had his church superiors. It was impossible to sever a town from the world completely.

 

And yet Alex could feel the isolation of the place, the smallness. It was less than a day’s drive from Seattle, but it felt like a different world, a place of rustling firs and the unceasing whisper of the sea. There was a darkness here that didn’t exist in the cities she was used to, and at that moment, even with Richard walking steadily by her side, it felt very much as if the darkness might swoop down and take her. She felt lost, confused. She wanted, more than anything, to understand.

 

“Alex,” said Richard suddenly, out of the silence. “You know that—that what Sedgewick was saying isn’t real. None of this is possible. You do know that, don’t you?”

 

“I don’t know anything,” said Alex, low. She had long since turned off the recorders. She turned his face towards Richard’s, absurdly reassured by the worry she saw there. “It’s not that I believe him, or any of them. It’s just that impossible doesn’t seem like the restriction that it used to be.”

 

“There’s always a rational explanation,” said Richard.

 

“And what would you do if there wasn’t?”

 

They walked on in silence. They were nearly at the hotel when Richard said, measured,

 

“I suppose, then, that I would do something drastic.”

 

Alex turned to look at him. It hadn’t occurred to her that he had taken her question seriously. Of course he had. She didn’t know what he meant by drastic. She was afraid that she didn’t want to know, that there were some mysteries she wanted to keep in her heart, unlocked.

 

“Something drastic,” Alex repeated. She felt calmer somehow. “Then I guess I’ll have to do the same.”

 

Her face burned against the cold. The lobby, when Richard turned away from her with a jerk and pushed open the doors, was too warm. They took the one elevator up the two stories to their floor. There was something wrong with it: the air in it filled with electricity, and impossible to breathe, and the trip took an eternity. Alex thought, several times, of breaking the silence. In the end they walked to their adjoining rooms without speaking.

 

Richard paused at the threshold, the door already tipped open.

 

“Good night, Ms. Reagan,” he said. His voice was so deep.

 

“Good night, Dr. Strand,” she replied, and they walked into their separate rooms.

 

She woke from dreams of inchoate terror, some evil dissipating from between her clutching fingers, refusing to be known; she had an ill-defined, terrifying impression of eyes behind glassy windows, of sea-rot and damp wood beneath her feet. She was upright and shivering before it fully struck her that she was awake. The red numbers on the clock told her it was well past midnight. There was no way she could go back to sleep like this. She drew back the curtains over the sliding glass door that led to the balcony she shared with Richard. The clouds had drawn apart, and the moon was out, a slim horned crown in the sky, shedding silver light on the snow. There was something clean and pure about it, as if it could wash away her bad dreams. She pulled on a coat and boots over her raggedy sleeping clothes and stepped out into the snow.

 

There was a cigarette packet and lighter in her inside pocket, an impulsive purchase at a gas station on the road. Alex shook one out of the packet, fumbling with it. She hadn’t smoked since college, the last time she had found self-destruction appealing.

 

She must have woken Richard somehow, despite her best efforts to be silent. He slid open his own door and stepped out, looking very odd with his thick wool coat and winter gear on over silk pajamas. Of course he had silk pajamas. He saw the cigarette in her hand at once, and frowned.

 

“Since when do you smoke?” he asked.

 

She fumbled with the lighter. “Ever since I accidentally started the end of the world,” she said, only half-ironically. Her fingers, stiff with cold, refused to work properly. “Stupid—”

 

“Let me,” said Richard. He took the lighter from her hands. Their fingertips brushed. He got the flame lit on his second try, burning small against the enveloping darkness. He leaned in, held it so close to her that she forgot to breathe. When she finally managed to get the cigarette lit, she inhaled too quickly and ended with a throatful of smoke.

 

“Been a while?” asked Richard, with a hint of the smile in his voice. To her surprise, he took a cigarette for himself.

 

“Since when do _you_ smoke?” said Alex, when she had recovered from her coughing fit.

 

He turned it over dubiously in his hands.

 

“Since now, I suppose,” he said, putting it between his lips, and spun the wheel of the lighter.

 

It wouldn’t start. He shook it, as if that would help anything, but still no flame came. Alex noted that his fingers were trembling, despite his expensive heat-tec gloves.

 

“Never mind.” He dropped the lighter into the snow and looked at Alex, the cigarette still dangling improbably from his mouth. Before she could say anything, he leaned in towards her.

 

He touched the end of his cigarette to hers. His breath, fast and shallow, warmed her cheeks. Their noses were nearly touching. His touch burned through the glove where he cupped her cheek. Alex inhaled sharply; her cigarette flared against Richard’s, and the flame caught.

 

Richard looked surprised at himself as he drew away. Alex was surprised too, at that. Her lips tingled as if she had been kissed, although nothing had touched them. She let out a breath full of smoke, took the cigarette from her mouth, held it between her fingers. It was as warm as her face.

 

Richard took only a perfunctory draw of the cigarette before he took it away from his mouth. Alex could tell he hadn’t inhaled.

 

“I’m sure you know these are a bad idea,” he said.

 

“That’s the appeal. Have you never done anything risky?”

 

“Risk is a relative statement of probability. As I understand it, these—” He tapped ash off the end of his cigarette with a disapproving frown— “are a certain danger.”

 

Alex took a long drag, tipping her head back and exhaling upwards, letting the smoke make shapes against the distant stars. She couldn’t help but smile.

 

“Thanks for keeping me company,” she said. “I do appreciate it.”

 

“I—” Richard cleared his throat. “Well. I’m happy to do it. Keep you company, I mean. Not to smoke. It’s a habit destructive to both the individual and to society—”

 

“I’m aware,” said Alex drily.

 

They stood together without speaking for a while. He hadn’t asked why she was out of bed in the middle of the night, indulging in a habit she hadn’t picked up since she was a teenager. He didn’t need to; he only wanted to be there with her. The thought warmed her.

 

When the cigarette burned down, she didn’t reach for another.

 

“And that’s enough for me,” she said. Her voice was scratchy from the smoke, and it made her oddly self-conscious. “Time to stare at the ceiling in the dark until morning, I guess. Or as I like to call it, sleep.”

 

“I think that’s exactly what you need right now,” said Richard seriously, utterly disregarding the sarcasm. “You’ve been exhausted. It makes me worry.”

 

Alex didn’t know what to say to that. As usual, Richard had disarmed her.

 

She walked back into her room, shedding her coat and boots, only to hear a knock at the adjoining door a moment later. Alex opened it to find Richard Strand on the other side. He had switched out his wool coat for a wool cardigan, donned a pair of reading glasses, and was holding a solemn-looking paperback in his hand.

 

“Um,” said Alex.

 

“Alex. May I come in?”

 

She let him in.

 

Richard seemed taller somehow within the confines of her room. Space warped around him: the distance between them seemed both perilously small and catastrophically wide. It seemed to Alex that Richard was taking up more air, too, than he usually did; what remained felt a little thin. Alex shook her head. It was the middle of the night, she was thinking nonsense. Her editor would have struck this garbage out on sight.

 

Richard cleared his throat. “I find myself unable to sleep,” he said. “I thought I might continue to keep you company. Do you…mind if I read?” He gestured to the empty chair by the lamp.

 

“Oh! Um. Sure? I mean, yes. Um. Yes.”

 

Feeling exceptionally awkward, Alex backed up to sit on the bed. Richard settled onto the dusty floral-patterned armchair like it was an old favorite.

 

“Don’t let me keep you up,” he informed her. “I often read late into the night. I’m sure you would prefer to sleep.”

 

It was fairly transparent, but Alex couldn’t say she could think of anything better to suggest. She slipped beneath her bedcovers. Maybe she could pretend to be asleep until he left. She might even be lucky enough to catch a quick catnap before her dreams woke her again.

 

Alex resettled herself on the pillow. She _was_ exhausted, and the bed was still warm from the memory of her body. Somehow the specter of bad dreams felt less real in Richard’s presence, banished to the childish fear that it ought to have been. She yawned, a little too wide to be polite, and glanced at Richard to see if he had noticed. He appeared to be transfixed by his book.

 

“Reading anything interesting?”

 

Richard looked up from the page. “Very,” he said, in a tone of voice that told Alex that she would regret having asked. “It’s a philosophical treatise on the ethical standards that apply to personhood, particularly in regards to how we conceptualize the mind and what it must mean to have one. Currently, we associate certain behaviors with certain kinds of minds, which the author argues is a flaw in the—”

 

“Uh huh,” said Alex sleepily.

 

“But I can see that you’d prefer to discuss the topic in detail in the morning, when you are able to give it the focus it deserves.”

 

Alex cracked one eye open just long enough to check if Richard Strand was finally getting acquainted with irony. His face was as serene as a statue as he looked down onto the page. Amazing. She really couldn’t tell. If he ever needed another million, he could win it in poker.

 

She closed her eyes again. The dry rustling of pages turning in Richard’s hands was oddly soothing, and the light of his lamp was a comforting glow in her periphery. In moments she fell swiftly, miraculously, into a deep and dreamless sleep.

 

* * *

 

 

Nic had few ideas, and only one piece of advice.

 

“Don’t go to the lighthouse.” His image on Skype fractured for a moment, and came back into focus to reveal his frown. “I hope you’re not even considering it. It mostly sounds like this cult leader wants to lure you and Strand somewhere remote. You have more than enough material for an episode—you know, assuming we’re renewed—just drive away today and let the creeps stay in Creeptown.”

 

“I’ll take that under advisement,” said Alex absently. “Do you think you can turn up anything about Jonathan Knightley’s time in Wichita? The minister suggested that something may have changed him out there.”

 

The jumpy connection transformed Nic’s sigh into an electronic gust of static.

 

“I’ll look into it,” he promised. “But seriously, Alex—”

 

Alex pressed the mute button and turned to raise her eyebrow at Richard, standing next to her.

 

He stirred his coffee.

 

“I didn’t say anything,” he said mildly.

 

“But you agree with him.”

 

“Certainly, yes. But I didn’t say anything about it.”

 

“You’re not curious at all? You don’t want any answers?”

 

“It’s not a matter of wanting. It’s a matter of doubting that answers, if they exist, will be provided.”

 

Alex scowled at him, but there was no bite to it. She had woken that morning feeling more refreshed than she had felt for months, her head miraculously clear. Richard had been asleep in the chair, book still splayed open beneath his hand. He had stayed with her through the night, keeping bad dreams at bay.

 

After she had hung up on Nic, Alex opened a new tab and began some research of her own. She spent the next hour or so looking into towns that had vanished. There was the usual junk, the obvious creepypasta and urban legends, a dozen articles about Centralia, Pennsylvania, and a more mundane scattering of listicles on gold towns that had died as quickly as they had sprung up. She read them all, and learned nothing of value. She didn’t need Richard hovering over her shoulder to tell her that they were mostly nonsense. Most of the towns that had “vanished” had perfectly mundane explanations. There were stories of ones that didn’t: towns that blew away in dust storms, or were sucked into holes in the sky, but even the most credulous retellings of those stories had to admit that there was no evidence of any such town existing in the first place.

 

Unbidden, a line wrote itself in her mind. _There is no evidence that a town named Desdemona Sands has ever existed in Oregon…_

 

A Slack message from Nic popped up on the screen, interrupting unwelcome thoughts.

 

**_nsilver:_ ** _Found a Jonathan Knightley just outside Wichita._

**_nsilver:_ ** _No social media, no email, just a phone number_

**_nsilver:_ ** _does this license picture look familiar though?_

 

A picture appeared on the screen. An ordinary man, with an ordinary face, wearing the bemused, slightly slack expression native to DMVs across the country. He had the same scar on his cheek.

 

**_areagan:_ ** _that’s him. he’s not so creepy in this one though_

**_nsilver:_ ** _I don’t know what to tell you. According to the fitness app on his phone, he’s still in Kansas_

**_areagan:_ ** _he’s been here for months. that’s what Sedgewick told us_

 

A telephone number appeared in the window.

 

**_nsilver:_ ** _Call him and find out, then._

 

The line rang for what seemed like hours. Richard had put down his book, leaning forward in his seat, so she put it on speaker. The unanswered ringing filled the room.

 

Alex was about to hang up when the other end picked up. A man’s voice, slightly out of breath, answered.

 

“Hello?”

 

It certainly sounded like the man they had met in the town square. Alex swallowed.

 

“Is this Jonathan Knightley?”

 

“Speaking. Who is this?”

 

“My name is Alex Reagan, from Pacific Northwest Stories. I host a show called The Black Tapes.”

 

There was silence on the line. “Yes,” he said eventually. “I’ve heard of you.”

 

“I hope so,” said Alex. “Considering we spoke just yesterday.”

 

“Excuse me?”

 

“You and a hundred of your closest friends tried to trample us to death in the town square. Does that ring a bell?”

 

Confusion was evident in the man’s voice. “I’ve never talked to you before now. I haven’t even gone downtown in months.”

 

“How did you know we were coming to Desdemona Sands?”

 

The silence on the other end of the line stretched on so long that Alex was afraid he’d hung up.

 

"I see," he said finally. "You know, I don't listen to your show. I've never felt the need to, if you follow. It's all things that I've left behind me. But there should probably be someone out there, doing what you do. If you want to keep doing it, I think you should leave town."

 

“What exactly does that mean?”

 

“It means that I haven’t stepped foot in Desdemona Sands in twelve years. There’s no one else with my name living there. I’m the last of the Knightley family.”

 

“Well,” said Alex, slowly. “If that’s true, then there is someone else in Desdemona Sands right now, claiming be you.”

 

When Jonathan Knightley spoke again, his words came quick, almost garbled. His voice was shaking.

 

“Listen to me,” he said. “When I was twelve, my parents brought me to the foot of the lighthouse and drained me of nearly all my blood. They shaved my head and gave it my hair, they pulled off my fingernails, they sliced off skin from my face. They gave it all to the lighthouse. I still can’t smile properly. Do you understand? I was in a coma for days. This is what you’re dealing with.”

 

“Oh, god,” said Alex. “Who would do that to their own child?”

 

“The question you should be asking yourself instead: what kind of entity would demand it? And why? No, never mind. It doesn’t matter, does it? Just do what I did. Run away, and don’t look back.”

 

The line went dead.

 

* * *

 

 

The false Knightley had said to meet at sundown. Richard and Alex left their hotel at 4 pm, leaving their keys at the empty counter. If anyone had minded their late checkout, no one was around to reprimand them.

 

In fact, the entire town seemed empty as they drove through it, lights out at all the houses, the shops closed and dark, no cars or people out in the roads. It would soon be the longest night of the year, and the sun was already a dim, dispirited eye over the dark ocean. Richard slowly turned the car onto the road leading out of town. On the crest of the hill they could take their last glimpse of the sea stacks, standing tall in the last light of the dying sun, indifferent to the waves pounding against their sides. Knightley had likened Richard to the shoals and the storms, but there was nothing Alex thought more fitting for Richard than these very stones, endlessly stalwart against the winds and tides of magic tricks and petty opinion. No wonder bad dreams kept their distance.

 

“I don’t feel particularly prepared for this,” remarked Richard, as the lighthouse came into view on the road. “Do you?”

 

“I don’t think there is such a thing as being prepared,” said Alex. She had done all she could, sending audio and notes for narration back to Nic in Seattle. The episode could be made without her, if necessary. Alex had planned to spend the afternoon talking to other locals in the town, trying to gather what information she could find, but she found she had no more stomach for it, not after hearing Jonathan Knightley’s story.

 

She had looked up old police records on the internet as soon as it had become clear that Knightley—the real Knightley—wasn’t planning on picking up her phone calls again anytime soon. She searched through all the records for the county during the entire year that Knightley had been twelve, but there were no records of any Knightleys arrested for child abuse or assault on a minor.

 

He was in the hospital records, though, provided courtesy of Nic’s hacker friend. Jonathan Knightley’s cause of injury had been listed as a suicide attempt, accompanied by a paranoid breakdown. Thirteen days in the emergency ward, and three months in psychiatric treatment. According to the nurse’s notes, Knightley had been screaming nonsense about shadows coming out of the water, and had claimed that his parents were trying to sacrifice him. He later made a full recovery. A local newspaper article she had found in the online archives told her that his parents, at least, had had some consolation during this time: while their son was in a coma, the Knightleys had been given an award from the Desdemona Sands Historical Society. “Citizen Contributions to Historical Sites”.

 

The lighthouse came nearer. Richard pulled off to the shoulder of the road, still a hundred yards from the headland. His hand hesitated on the ignition.

 

“We don’t have to do this.”

 

“Don’t you remember what Sedgwick said? Whatever the truth is, we’re getting closer to it.”

 

“Alex. There is no truth to be found here.”

 

She let herself out the passenger door and set off down the road. In a moment Richard was beside her, and together they reached the headland, looking at the straight path it cut into the ocean, the jagged rocks that edged the path and the dark water that lathed the rocks, and the lighthouse that stood on its pilings like many spindly legs, looking back at them.

 

Everything seemed to be moving slowly: the clouds fixed in the sky, the waves at their feet sluggish and thick, the distant calling of a crow in the trees drawn out strangely. Only the sun was moving quickly, falling swiftly, almost eagerly, into the sea.

 

Knightley, or whatever had claimed to be him, wasn’t anywhere in sight. But the door was open, and the shadows within beckoned to her. Had the door been open before? Yes, of course, the door had always been open, ever since the lighthouse was first built, and before. She moved in a straight line across the headland, unafraid, her heart beating triumphantly in her chest. She heard her own name called, hoarsely, from behind her back. She walked into the darkness within the door without looking back.

 

Within there were stairs, although her eyes could not see them. Her hand found the rail, her foot found the stair. The wood was damp and soft beneath her hand. She heard her name again, this time screamed aloud, but it was like a radio tuned to the wrong frequency, or a whisper on the other side of a door. She ascended. The stair unwound before her, easily, swiftly, all the way up into the narrow turret.

 

On all sides of her were windows, looking out into the blackening twilight. She had seen this view before, she thought, but she could not remember when. Turning surely in the dimness she found, as she had known she would, the lamp. It was gleaming in the grey light, a contrast to the old wood and warped glass around it. Someone had ensured that the lamp would be new, this night. Alex ran her hand over it. No dust, and no cobwebs. She wrapped her hand around the heavy switch, delighting in the cold press of metal against her skin, the certainty of its weight as she began to pull it.

 

Her name, a third time, like a fly buzzing in her ear. She jerked her head against the sound. There was Richard, his face drawn and pale in the darkness, climbing the stairs on his hands and knees, effortfully; dragging himself upwards against something that hated him. His fingernails were torn where they had sunk into the wood. He was panting as if every step had been a struggle, when Alex had flown up the stairs, danced.

 

“Alex! _What are you doing?_ ”

 

She could not comprehend the question, nor the reason for asking it. There were answers, she wanted to say, there were answers in the dark, they were all here, they had already been found, there was no more need for questions.

 

She turned the switch.

 

There was a brief rumbling of power, circuits completing, wires conducting, electricity rushing, the machinery of the lamp waking up. But there couldn’t possibly be electricity here, she thought opaquely. No outlets, no wires, no generators. The thought was gone a moment later. With a buzzing, spitting roar, the light turned on. The night split in two, a beam of perfect white turning the shadows black. It shone out the windows and blazed on the sea, the still, glassy sea, making a straight line of light out to the horizon, and beyond; the light was a path on the water, a perfect white path on the still black water, and there was something coming down it.

 

Alex remembered now where she had seen this view before. In the photograph, the one that hung on the wall of that sad, ramshackle historical society. It seemed like a long time ago now. In the photograph a shape had been half-hidden in the fog; Alex remembered straining to make it out, puzzling over it. She was not puzzled now: in fact, everything was clear.

 

Down the white path came a ship.

 

It was far away but coming closer, sailing on a wind and a tide that was not of any ocean. Her sails were full, her outline sharp, almost hungry. There was room enough on her for them all. Alex watched her come, dreamily. The voice that shouted in her ear did not bother her, or the hands that shook her by the shoulders and forced her to look away from the sea. Alex looked into Richard’s face, smiling a little. There was a desperation there that she did not understand. For some reason she found it funny.

 

“Alex,” said Richard brokenly, pleading. He had not spoken with his lips. Alex felt something in the back of her mind struggling. She heard, from the town, the faint ringing of bells.

 

They chipped at the fog of her mind. She had been asleep, she was waking; she was trapped in dreams, but she was aware of it now, aware she had to wake up. Dreaming, she touched his face. Bad dreams kept their distance from him, she thought muzzily.

 

“Richard?” she asked, wonderingly, and hope came into his face like a blazing light.

 

"Alex," he said again, his voice low like thunder, and kissed her.

 

At once Alex was awake, truly, deliciously awake: she wondered that she had never thought herself half-asleep, before, now that she knew how alive she could be, with Richard’s mouth on hers and his arms coiled around the small of her back. She was conscious of the beat of her blood, and the little hairs on the skin of her arms; she was aware of every part of her body, and of Richard’s skin where it was touching hers, and the electricity that flowed between them.

 

They parted. Alex took a shuddering breath. The bells were tolling loud in her ears. She looked around, suddenly afraid of what she saw. The light facing the window shone with awful clarity on the skeletal ship that was coming for them, gleaming dark and glossy in the light like of shine of human fingernails. Around them she could feel the shadows moving.

 

Richard grabbed at her wrist and pulled. They were running headlong down the stairs, heedless of the danger, stumbling blindly for the door. Then they were out, although the night was so dark it was hard to tell; there were no stars overhead. The car was so far away, an infinite distance, and Alex felt a sob tear at her throat, unreasoning fear driving her, even after they had reached the car after all, making her hands fumble at the door. She could choke on her fear, but there was something more she had to do. She threw herself into the car. Richard was jerking at the clutch, forcing the car into motion, but Alex was looking for something, scrambling among the debris on her floor, her hand finally clasping around it on the floor behind the driver’s seat.

 

“Stop the car!”

 

The brakes squealed. Alex fumbled the door open and scrambled out, despite Richard’s startled yell. Her fingers were white around the crowbar.

 

It was harder to run into the lighthouse, this time. Shadows grabbed at her, made stronger by the light. They clung to her skin like cobwebs, yanked cruelly at her hair. But their attention was divided: whatever it was that watched from within the lighthouse was not looking at her. It was looking at the sea, anticipatory, giddy; Alex felt the backwash of its hunger and joy flood through her and drain out again. She pushed herself onwards, up the stairs. The shadows did not drag her down as they had dragged Richard. They let her pass. She could smell rot now, the stench of dead wood and dead fish, and perhaps things that lived, too, that should not have. She reached the turret, ran to the lamp. For a moment she stood there, just outside that blinding whiteness, and looked out upon the sea.

 

The ship was nearly to the shore. She could see the faces of that which it carried, every detail utterly vivid in the white glare. She saw them, and they—they saw her.

 

For a moment she could not move. She would carry those faces with her forever, she thought numbly; they were imprinted now onto her soul. They would be with her in the dark when she closed her eyes, always.

 

She was shaking from head to toe, uncontrollably, but her arms were still her own, and they raised the crowbar up and smashed it into the light, breaking the glass and the bulb within, attacking it with all her strength, until the light was gone, utterly, and the ship with it. Her hands were nerveless; they let the crowbar slip to the floor. In her mind there was only instinct, and she followed it, escaping out of the lighthouse as she had done before. There was only one safe harbor she wanted to find, and he was waiting for her in the road.

 

Alex ran to the safety of the open car door, Richard’s face like a light in the darkness, calling her home.

**Author's Note:**

> Desdemona Sands is a real place where a real ship wrecked, and the subsequent site of a real lighthouse. There is no town, however, and those events and places bear no resemblance to this story. I simply liked the names.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed.


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